


The Marked

by Demmora



Category: Dishonored
Genre: Meta, Other, character exploration, prompts, the mark, the outsider and his weird horrifying family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-18
Updated: 2017-04-17
Packaged: 2018-10-20 10:42:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 4,434
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10660917
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Demmora/pseuds/Demmora
Summary: Of all those marked, Corvo is the only one who never builds a shrine. Nothing can compare to the devotion in his Heart.





	1. Rags

**Author's Note:**

> An old series of fics from back when I had time to participate in fandom weeks, taken from The Marked character prompt.

On the day that the Emperor proposes, Vera Dubhghoill laughs. At just fifteen she is the darling of the court and everyone is in love with her. Especially the Emperor. He is a handsome man, for his age, and wears power like a cloak. But Vera knows that no matter how well gilded, a cage is still a cage.

He is dead three years later, poor man, dead from a broken heart.

The day that Empress Larisa is crowned, Vera Dubhghoill dances at the coronation ball on the arm of a young gentleman whose name she does not know. He is handsome though, and Vera knows they cut a fine figure together on the dance floor. A sigh ripples through the court as they waltz past, and Larisa catches her eye, nodding to her as though they are equals. It makes Vera laugh, to think that she could ever be equal to her. Poor, dear, Empress, she’ll learn soon enough.

The day that Vera Dubhghoill walks down the aisle of the Abbey and emerges as Lady Vera Moray is a happy one. Her own family was great in power and prestige, but Preston Moray offers her adventure. He promises, like no man ever has not even the Emperor himself, to take her with him as he travels the world, to show her the very edges of the Empire and beyond. He jokes that together they might fall off the edge of the world. Vera knows they will.

The seasons turn and change, Larisa is assassinated, wars and starvation come and go and new Emperors are crowned. But it’s Vera Moray who sits for a portrait, eyeing up the young artist as he works, his own eyes turned to her in such a brazen way she feels as though he might be able to see her soul. It has been years since someone has looked at her with such hunger, and Vera revels in the attention. “You’ll paint no one else but me,” she reminds him, and smirks just a little when his hand strays to his pocket where her coin purse sets the fabric of his coat askew.

“None but you, Lady Vera.” Sokolov confirms, fixing her with a rakish smile, “None so formidably fierce and beautiful.”

The painting is a good likeness in the end, but somehow her eyes seem much darker than they ought to.

The day He comes to her, Vera knows at last she has found her equal. Here in the great terrors of the Pandyssian continent, the Outsider whispers to her, and shows her the power she always knew to lie dormant in her soul. It only needed an outlet, a small mark on her skin which shines so prettily in the darkness. So pretty, pretty, _pretty._ Preston is wary of it, and says that all will be right when they are home again once more, all will be well once they leave this place. But Vera knows they can never leave, they have died here, together they have fallen off the edge of the world and everything must turn to black. _Black, black, black, blacker than his eyes, black, black, black, with purple tinted skies._

Dunwall is so dreary, so very, very dreary. She had to do it though you see, she had to, he was going to take away her little birdies and then whatever would she do? She would go mad without them, mad, mad, mad, without their pretty little songs and black little eyes. She couldn’t see without their eyes, so what else could she do? He had been a good man though, in his way, a good, good man. At least she’d always have his bones to remember him by. Such pretty smooth bones! So cool against her skin! She would give one to Morris, Morris liked her carved bones, though he didn’t say much. Poor Preston, never had, he didn’t like her bones, or her little birdies, such a shame, such a shame. And he’d danced so well…so very, very well…

 _“Granny, Granny Granny, come out with me instead. Granny, Granny Granny, you can’t because you’re **dead.**_ “

They call her Granny Rags now, she calls herself that too, although she knows it is not right. Sometimes He calls her something else, and the mark on her skin sings and lights up the bleakness of her world and she remembers smooth silks and perfumed frocks and shining diamonds at her throat. She asks Him to dance then, her dear sweet boy with the black eyes, but he never says yes. Curious, for all young people love to dance, but instead she merely laughs and dances with her little birdies instead.

A noise from upstairs makes the birdies startle, and Granny cocks her head to one side. Footsteps, the light footsteps of a dancer! In her house! And oh, _oh_ how his soul _sings to her_ , how the mark on his hand _calls to her.  
_

 _“_ Is that you, my dear husband? _”_ the figure halts, and she can smell him, the stink of the city on his clothes, but above all else the stench of suffering and pain beyond all measure, of a heart that is broken and aching for comfort it can never have, seeping into his bones, pouring out of his skin. It sets her mouth to watering as though she is a starving hound. _Oh the things she could do with those bones…_ _  
_

_“_ My eyes aren’t what they used to be.” she carries on, reaching out to him, knowing that he won’t pull back until it’s too late. No one is frightened of dear old _Granny, poor old Granny, blind old Granny, **crazy old Granny**. _ “Have you seen my little birdies? The dear things must be starving without their Granny. Here birdies!”

A thump at the front door makes them both jump, though she smiles to know that his first instinct was to draw his weapon and turn as though he would protect her, this darling sweet boy who has danced into her life, a gift, she knows, a gift from _Him_ , not to eat his bones but to protect her, like…like…Preston used to…who was Preston…oh yes, such lovely bones…such a lovely gift…

“Oh, my my my I think I have gentleman callers again, but not the way I used to, not the nice ones. I hear them and they’re not very polite ones either. Granny Rags, Granny Rags, let us in! Ah well, they’ll go away again if they know what’s good for them, but what a _bother_.”

He is _amused_ she can feel it in the air between them. But he is also _hungry,_ hungry for something which food cannot sate and sleep cannot diminish. She remember the hunger well, the agony of the fresh mark on her skin, how it craves, how it needs, how it _devours everything, even the sun…_ She smiles and offers him the key.

“Here’s the key to the front door, love. You’ll see to those ruffians, won’t you?”

“He’s a very nice young man,” she says when he is gone, one of Preston's bones held close against his skin, knowing that she is never truly alone. The rags about her arms have been unraveled, and she sits, stroking the tender flesh on the inside of her left wrist, where the mark burns, the skin around it undiminished by age, perfectly smooth and utterly rotten. “A very nice young man to help a dear old lady like me…tell me, do you think he will be any different?”


	2. Blade

He was born on the 13th day in the Month of Ice, on board a pirate ship bound for Serkonos. He remembers nothing of the crew or of the ship, but the sound of the sea and whale song haunts his dreams, mingling with the words his mother sang on cold and sleepless nights.

Many thought her to be a witch, for all her herbs and healing tinctures, so easily turned to devices of death and sickness. But she bore no mark the zealots could find, and the Oracles took pity on a lowly woman with naught but her herblore to feed her and her mewling infant son—beset by misfortune and the malicious slander of jealous men—and both were spared the cleansing fire.

In another life she might have been one of them.

When he was eight he joined a gang, fought hard and ran even harder, cutting purses free of their strings and robbing rich merchants of their shiny trinkets. His mother whipped him when she found out. But she still took the coin he had earned and they ate meat that day for the first time in months. She never whipped him again.

When he was nine a man came into their home. He was an actor, his mother said, a man who pretended to be other people, and was paid well to do it. He had a rich manner of speaking, one moment a lord and at the other dropped to a lower-town Serkonan drawl as vile and vulgar as an urchin. And how Daud would laugh and mimic him to the delight of both the actor and his mother. Perhaps he would tread the boards one day, be a great star, be famous, be special, he could be _useful_ …he was nine when he woke up on board another ship, the sound of the ocean thick in his ears and the taste of his mother’s sleepwell tincture in his mouth. He never saw her again. 

He was ten the first time they caught him and branded him as a thief, and the man who pretended to be other men beat him for getting caught. He was ten when he slit the sleeping man’s throat and ran away into the night.

He was sixteen when he reached the high walled ports of Dunwall. Sixteen and ragged to the bone when a merchant spat on him for trying to buy a loaf of bread. He was sixteen when he decided to wage war on the city of Dunwall, on the capital seat of the Empire which let its people starve and grew fat on the suffering of others. The watchmen tried to apprehend him, but he cut through them too, like sheaves of corn falling before the sickle of the reaper. He was sixteen and already coated in enough blood to drown a man. Why stop there?

“Ego homini Lupus“— “I am a Wolf to Man”. A little pretentious perhaps, but it serves it’s purpose. The type of men who hire him like to think they too are wolves among sheep. Only Daud knows they are but pigs.

When the shrine lit up and the man appeared, Daud wasn’t sure who was more surprised, him or the Outsider. He has stopped counting the years now, it has been too many to recall since he began this search for the one being feared the most in all the world.

“You are persistent, aren’t you, Daud?” the black eyed bastard crooned, seemingly amused by the offerings left at every shrine from the lowest basement in Dunwall to the highest cliffs in Morley. “How very skilled you are, to always find my shrines. But what should I give you in return?”

He spends that winter at the Academy of Natural Philosophy. It’s too cold to go anywhere else and Dunwall is too far to reach in the snow. So instead he sits and listens to old men, who dabble with the same tinctures and herbs his mother would have been burned as a heretic for, and tries not to sneer as they are heralded as geniuses and harbingers of change as he nurses the black mark on the back of his hand. It itches, and it is an itch that can only be scratched by use of the power it wields. And it hurts to use, the most delicious ache in his bones, an overwhelming need, the most exquisite torture he has ever known burning him up from the inside. Daud has always been clever, has always been in control, but now he has the power to truly bring change to the world.

The Outsider has told him so.

The first time he tries to share his power with another the street urchin dies. Later that night as he stands before the shrine, dripping blood from his cut hand onto the offering, the Outsider comes. Daud suspects him to be laughing, laughing at the idea of wanting to _share_ the power Daud has sought after for so long. But how else can he do what he wants? How else can he train his people to be the best, how else can he become what the Abbey fears the Outsider to be? It gives him a thrill every time he walks within the Abbey walls, to hear the fearful chant “he walks among us” and know they do not know how right they are. 

“You really wish this?” the Outsider presses, and Daud simply nods. “Very well.”

The second time he shares power with another, he binds their soul to himself, drawing the sigils of power on their broken skin, mixing his tainted blood with theirs. He can feel it, always there, like a wounded animal just on the edge of hearing. If the Whaler feels such despair he does not let it show, if anything he marvels at the feeling of power, and Daud smirks to know that it is but a mere fraction of what he possess, a thimbles worth to an ocean of strength. And they are grateful for it, his faithful hounds, his ruthless hunters, who dare to walk in the shadow of a _wolf_.

“ _Mommy!”_

He has stopped counting the years, stopped counting the bodies, the money…you could float a whale on the amount of noble blood he has spilled…but somehow this is different. Somehow it’s all going wrong…

“ _Please, take me back to Corvo…”  
_

It’s all falling apart…


	3. Thorn

For as long as she could remember, Delilah loved flowers. It was her greatest joy on rest days, to head out of the city walls and toward the surrounding meadows and fields not yet laid asunder by the modernization of the city. Where the stench of whale oil could not reach and nature bloomed in glorious color. She had grown up in Dunwall tower, not unused to the finery and splendor money could buy, but flowers were somehow more appealing. 

She and Jessamine were sitting in the royal gardens, gathering flowers to give to Jessamine’s mother, who was enduring the sickliest pregnancy Delilah’s mother said she had ever seen. There were peonies for health and larkspur for spirit and pink tulips for care. But the two had become distracted, and were weaving flower chains instead.

Off to one side, aloof but ever present, the new royal guard lurked under the pagoda, close enough should he be needed, but far enough not to intrude.

“When I am a fine and noble lady,” Delilah announced, causing Jessamine to giggle at her imitation of a baroness they both hated, “I shall wear nothing but flowers.”

“I think that would be very cold.” Jessamine replied, and laughed when Delilah stuck her tongue out.

“You’ll see. I’ll twine myself in roses, and everyone will say I am enchanting.”

 

 

The day that they whipped her Delilah vowed that no one would ever harm her again. She would rather die than be humiliated like that again. And for what? Some silly little game? There wasn’t a teenage girl alive who hadn’t tried to summon a spirit, but because it was  _Jessamine_ suddenly it was tantamount to witchcraft. And of course the dear sweet princess had barely been scolded, oh no, her punishment had been to watch  _Delilah_ be whipped. And she’d even had the nerve to cry, as though it had been her flesh being mortified, and  _her_ mother cast out into the streets. And now Delilah had been turned away from her position as well, and all the doors in the world which she had never seen before suddenly slammed shut. She might have been the royal companion since birth, but now she was Miss Copperspoon. And no one cared who that was.

She’d show them how wrong they were. By the time she was done, everyone would know her name.

_Everyone._   
  


_  
“_ It’s quite remarkable, but it will never sell.”

Delilah turned about to stare at Sokolov who had entered in through the back door of the studio. It wasn’t even noon yet and there was a bottle in his hands.

“Why ever not?” 

“I know what people like about art my dear, and it is not in fact, art.” he chuckled at his own joke, and Delilah turned back to her painting, irritated by his presence. 

At first it had felt like a privilege to learn from him, but now she knew him to be just one more person holding her back. 

“Focus on your sculpting my dear, you’re good at that. The paint on your canvas is just too… “

“Alive.” Delilah finished for him, and carried on painting.

 

“Is that how you imagine me?” the voice is low and languid, and echoes strangely in her head, as though it is coming from a great distance away. She knew his eyes would be black, but had failed to anticipate the depth. She feels as though she is floating, and realizes this must be the void.

“It is how I have imagined you, in my dreams, I—” she stops and laughs at her own folly. “I cannot flatter you. I see that now. And here I believed the Abbey, that you were a corrupter of the soul and flesh ”

The Outsider tilts his head toward her, and suddenly she sees the red there, burning behind the black. “Am I not?”

She screams when the first thorn breaks through her skin, but after that there is only power, unbelievable power. And roses, so many roses.

 

“My dear,” Timsh breathes, “you paint with such vibrancy one could almost imagine you are painting the soul.”

“Am I not?” Delilah asks, sliding herself in front of the painting and lowering herself onto her haunches in front of him. It’s a cheap trick, but Timsh is a cheap and foolish man. “Do I not paint the ethereal majesty before me? Or do you think I am blind like all the rest?”

She smiles at the trinket he produces, the stone of the necklace cold and heavy around her neck, a dead weight compared to the magnificence of her flowers. But it’s a start.

 

The solidarity of sisterhood is easy to appeal to, when so many women have been brought low by a man, either directly of by circumstance. The first girl was easy, show her the power of the void, the power to possess a man and make him pay for his crimes, and the girl had thorns growing under her skin by nightfall. The rest followed with time, her own personal garden of deadly nightshades, willing and eager to defend their Witch-Queen, no matter the cost.

Billie had been a surprise, however tainted by the blood work of the assassin Daud. But she’d enjoyed their time together, surprisingly. A pity then that Daud would probably kill her when everything else began to fall into place, but no matter. Sacrifices had to be made. And Delilah always made sure none of them were her own. All she needed now was just a little more time…

And if all went to plan, no one would ever know her name.


	4. Heart

Of all those marked, Corvo is the only one who never builds a shrine. Nothing can compare to the devotion in his Heart.

 

With the lamplight  burning low and the perpetual chill of the Dunwall air creeping into his room, Corvo sits on the end of his bed and stares at nothing. At least that is how it appears to anyone who might enter the room now. Later, when some of the pain has abated, Corvo can’t help but laugh at the idea of what hysterics might have taken place had anyone seen him walking around with the beating heart in his hands. The Outsider knew there had been enough panicked screaming without it. 

But the bone charms are another matter, as are the ruins. He turns his gaze to them again, the sinister rattling collection that sits beside him on the bed, their sound skittering over the inside of his brain, pulling at his veins with the heady _desperate need_ for the power he knows they bring. He knows he must give them up, knows this as surely as he knows the back of his own hand…and this too is a problem…

But he’s glad, in some small sad way, that the Heart stays with him. He does not think he could bear to lose her again.

 

“Lord Protector,” the High Overseer greats him, extending a welcoming hand as Corvo enters through the chamber door. “I was told you would be early. Please, sit, can I offer you some refreshment?”

Corvo half turns his gaze to the serving cart, and is surprised to find no brandy there. Only what looks to be hot coffee and tea. It would seem that High Overseer Murdoch is a true man of the faith, and not prone to libations. At least, Corvo amends as he glances to the clock above the fireplace, not before noon anyway.

“Coffee, if you will have some yourself?”

Murdoch waves him into a chair, and takes the opposite seat, hands folded neatly in his lap. His gaze is sharp and serious, with none of the piggy-eyed redness Campbell had been known to have. But considering what Corvo had found out of the man in this very building, it was surprising the former High Overseer hadn’t looked much worse.

“There has been cause for some concern,” Murdoch begins, taking his coffee cup from the serving man and fixing Corvo with a steely smile. “About your influence on young Emily…particularly the-ah, _rumors_ and the…mark… on your hand.”

Corvo didn't bother to hide his discomfort, instead setting down his coffee cup down on the small table beside his chair and holding both hands out in front of him. He’d been preparing for something like this….

“Yes, I’m sure there is. High Overseer, as you are aware, I was wrongfully imprisoned for a period of six months, tortured, forced to try and confess to a heinous crime I could not in a thousand life times commit…” he swallows, but it does little ease the rasp in his voice, “and I tell you this as one man to his confessor, I could never have laid a hand on the woman…on the woman I loved.” 

Corvo had expected some shock, some outward sign of disapproval, but instead Murdoch merely nods, bright eyes dimmed by sadness. “And as the person to hear this confession I assure it dies with me…but unfortunately this does not put rest the rumors of your association with witchcraft and heresy…the council is pushing for a trial…”

 _Run, jump out the open window, find Emily, flee, find a boat…_ the words slither through his head, although whether they were his own thoughts or a product of the Void, Corvo does not know. Pushing them away, he fixes Murdoch with a humorless smile, letting his hands drop to his lap.

“Tell me, High Overseer, if you knew you were condemning an innocent man, would you not paint his hands in blood? If you were a wicked man, of course…would you not mark him? This mark, this…blight…is the result of my time spent at the hands of High Overseer Campbell and Burrows, it was their actions that brought it about, not mine.”

 _Liar,_ the voice breathes in the back of his mind, but Corvo dismisses it with a mental reproach that technically, _technically,_ this is true.

“Are you saying you were branded as part of your torture?” 

“Yes.” Corvo says, feeling the phantom pain on his face from the hot poker and self consciously raises his marked hand to the scar on his face. “Yes I was. Burrows and Campbell knew they could not convict me, not fairly…would that they could testify now, but it is my belief that Campbell is dead from plague and Burrows is quite mad…as for Admiral Havelock…it was not I who ordered men to be killed, and even when I was I did not. I am not a killer, High Overseer, not where it can be avoided. I never sought nor wished to use dark magics, not even in the rescue of my…of Lady Emily.”

The High Overseer watches him in silence for several moments, slowly nodding his head. “You speak the plain truth of the common man, Lord Protector, I can see that in your eyes…and have the men with stiff necks to prove it.” His smile is sudden and just a little bit wicked, and caught Corvo entirely off guard. “But we won’t bring that up. No harm…nothing a few weeks rest can’t fix at any rate. Slice of cake?”

 

The rocking of the boat could almost have been soothing, if Corvo wasn’t ready to crawl out of his own skin and leap overboard. It had been a far more harrowing experience than he thought it would be, removing the charms from his person, and putting them away into a wooden box. He felt certain it would have almost have been easier to chop off his own fingers one by one.

“Nice night.” Samuel comments, eyes turned skywards where the clouds were turning a brilliant pink hue. “We’ll have good weather in the morning.”

When Corvo doesn’t reply he carries on piloting the boat in silence, accustomed to his passenger enough by now to know when silence was not only desired but needed. When he finally brought the boat to a stop however, he turned concerned eyes on the younger man.

“Are you sure about this Sir? What if you need them…”

_Need, need, need yes want, need, you need us, you need us, you need to feel the blood pulsing in your veins, the power crackling, the control, you need us, you **want** us…you_

Without ceremony, Corvo stands up and drops the chest over the side, letting it sink the the deepest part of the river where the current could carry it away out to sea. 

“I’m sure.”


End file.
